Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I remember as Deputy Prime Minister going up around the Ipswich area and looking at the home development projects that were going ahead under the former coalition government. I visited there with Liberal-National Party senator Paul Scarr. There they were, the homeowners and first home buyers of Ipswich—constituents of the member for Blair, in fact—benefiting from those housing policies like the home buyer scheme put in place and contributed by the member for Deakin, the Minister for Housing. Labor come in here and they talk a big, big game about a trillion dollars worth of Liberal Party debt—not true. They talk about the fact that we didn't have a housing minister—not true. They think to themselves that, if they say it often enough, people will start to believe it. They in fact will start to believe it themselves, and it's just not true.

What we've got here in Australia is a situation where net overseas migration in 2023 was 446,000. What we're getting at the moment, according to the ABS, is 1,221 new migrants coming into Australia every day. And Labor talks about having 1.2 million homes built under its policies. Good luck with that! Good luck with housing all the migrants who are coming in—migrants who would fill many or most of the country towns in my Riverina electorate in a day or three. That's what we are seeing. We are seeing the equivalent of country towns flying in to Australia each and every day. The difficulty is that many of them, most of them, almost all of them, are going to our capital cities, primarily Sydney and Melbourne. The problem is we've got Labor leaders in those two states who say that the answer to our housing crisis is to go up. It is to build higher high-rises. This is ridiculous.

Aside from the Housing Australia Investment Mandate Amendment (Delivering on Our 2025 Election Commitment) Direction 2025—I always love the titles that Labor give their bills—we need to have a vision in this country. We need to have a good hard considered look at population policy. When it comes to finding houses, we've got the leaders of our state governments, our state parliaments, talking about building high-density housing, taking over all the sporting fields, the racecourses, the rugby fields and the golf courses and filling them up with more apartments. They've got to actually ask themselves: where is this going to lead? It's going to lead to more congestion, more pollution in our capital cities and, when people don't have room to move and air to breathe and they're all foisted in on top of one another, I dare say higher crime too.

Why don't we have a population roundtable? Forget the waste of time of the productivity roundtable, that talkfest we held in Canberra last week. Let's have a population roundtable where we get states and demographers and the Bernard Salts of the world in to talk about where we are headed as a nation as far as population is concerned. When we had that dreadful global pandemic, many people turned to the country areas—to go and live there. They loved it. They had a backyard and room to move in country towns that were big enough to get a good cup of coffee but small enough to still care. Yet we seem to have forgotten all that. Now we've got state leaders just wanting to build apartments, block upon block upon block upon each other.

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